The culture of Asia during the period of Mongol domination in the thirteenth and fourteenth centuries has in recent years begun to attract an attention that is long overdue. In China, during the short period of less than a hundred and fifty years when they ruled as the Yuan dynasty, the Mongols can now be seen to have acted quite unconsciously as a catalyst in the field of the arts, and nowhere is this more apparent than in the realm of ceramics to which this book is devoted. In the history of Chinese ceramics the period is marked by a richness of invention, both aesthetic and technical, which changed the whole direction of the art and craft. One of the most important features of the age was the impact of Near Eastern artistic influences, which became for a time a predominant stimulus for the experimentalism seen especially in the early fourteenth century, and without which the later flow of Chinese influence westward would have been much less startling and fruitful in its results. The aim in this book has been to see the evolution of Chinese porcelain and stoneware against the background of social change and economic pressures. Not only are the innovations both technical and artistic, such as are seen in the blue and white examined, but the chronology is also studied in the light of the archaeological work of recent years.
Miss Medley, as curator of the Percival David Foundation of Chinese Art in the University of London, is uniquely placed to study the material, so much of which is immediately available in this country, and to discuss a period as remarkable for the inventiveness of its potters as for the rapidity of its technical and industrial development.

16.5cm x 25.5cm, 139 pages, 124 plates, Hardcover, 1974 (Condition: Very Good) 

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